Robotics Systems Lab

A world-class field operation advancing robotic systems for air, land, sea, and space.

The RSL provides interdisciplinary, hands-on engineering education that engages and challenges undergraduate and graduate students in exciting ways. Systems are designed and controlled by students to meet the specific needs of a wide range of external clients and collaborators from government, academia, industry, and nonprofit sectors.

The Robotics Systems Laboratory was selected by the National Academy of Engineering as a model program for its Real World Engineering initiative and publication.

Facilities

Satellite mission control center with distributed radio communication stations on campus, at NASA Ames, and across the country

RSL staff member Thomas Adamek and graduate students Michael Neumann and Jasmine Cashbaugh led a number of students in an underwater robotics deployment in Monterey Bay as part of the ENGR 180 Marine Operations course. Students learned how to deploy and pilot the Triton tethered underwater robot. Guests included Fr. John Rose Santiago and program mentor Lloyd Droppers.

Graduate students Matthew Chin and Michael Neumann, with advisor Christopher Kitts received the Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Intelligent Automation and Robotics for "Object Manipulation Through Explicit Force Control Using Cooperative Mobile Multi-Robot Systems."

Christopher Kitts and graduate student Ashish Nair (mechanical engineering), with Nam Ling (computer engineering), received an equipment grant from nVIDIA to support a project involving the development of a novel 360-degree field of view panoramic 3D imaging and localization system. The system will exploit the GPU capabilities on nVIDIA embedded processing hardware to prototype a high-performance, low-cost robotic vision system.